The pram in the hallway

Jessica Ruston - 1 Sep 13

Actually, ‘the pram in the hallway’ is misleading; you can tell it was surely a man who described the particular challenges of writing with a baby in this way. If only it were that simple.

For, as those of us who write around babies know, it’s not the pram in the hallway that’s the problem (apart from when you’re tripping over it) – it’s the baby strapped to your chest, ready to wake at the too-heavy hit of a finger on keyboard. It’s the baby at your breast, holding on to you with grabbing, fat little hands, pinching your flesh between their fingers and pulling your attention back to them lest it should dare to wander.

It’s baby brain – but not what people usually mean by that, the confused, key-losing new mum wandering around the supermarket staring blankly at the shelves. It’s the baby in your brain. It’s her presence ever-hovering at the edges of your consciousness, her image blurring with those of your characters as you dream them into being. It’s shouts from the TV and the call of a seagull that meld into a question mark of – is that her cry? And the tug on your whole being as you are jerked back by it, back from the world you are trying to create into that of the one you have created.

So, that is the problem. Or, because it feels a bit wrong to call your beloved baby a problem, that is the challenge. What, then, is the solution – if there is one?

Here is mine – how I have approached things thus far.

When she was tiny I wrote with her in a sling, strapped to my chest, bouncing gently in an attempt to keep her sedated by movement for as long as possible. I was editing my fourth novel when she was 3.5 weeks old, going through copy edits at the 3 month mark, checking proofs a while later. Once I had started writing, I couldn’t stop – I wrote a spec TV script, two short stories, two book proposals, two more TV outlines… It churned out of me in an urgent splurge. The time I had to write in felt so compressed, the need to achieve something pressing. I walked, for miles along the seafront, coaxing her to sleep and my brain into action, emailing myself notes on my iphone as I began to plan and plot a new novel. I read on my kindle, and then on the kindle app, as I sat up in bed at night feeding her.

Then, as newborns do, she woke up. And suddenly she could no longer be relied upon to sleep, folded up like a sheet of crumpled paper on me. She wanted to look around, explore, pull hair and earrings and gaze up, smiling in that most distracting way. Out went her fourth trimester and with it, my peaceful hours of time to think and write. Now when I pushed her along the seafront I could not focus on the characters clamouring for attention, because she was craning her neck up at me and her need was greater and more beguiling than theirs. I could not read at night because I was busy walking up and down the bedroom floor. I couldn’t lay her in a swing chair to gurgle contentedly up at a dangling toucan for half an hour at a time, as she was straining at the harness and kicking her little legs determinedly.

So I changed things again. For a while I stopped, my focus directed on getting her to sleep, nap away from me, gently attempting to slip her into a sleep in a cot rather than my arms, a sleeping bag not a swaddle, a pink rabbit to hold as she drifted off in place of a breast. Easing her from a world with no edges and no corners into one where things happened at certain times and she was expected to learn a new way of living. A routine, where before there had been simply her, and me, and her wants, and her needs.

And now she is almost 9 months, has almost been out of me for as long as she was in me. She naps in the morning and again at lunchtime, and though the sand of the timer is always slipping through my fingers as I do so, I write, turning on Freedom and pushing the internet aside so I can power through words, challenging myself to write faster – can I get 1400 down in an hour? 1500? Can I push it to 2000, if I run downstairs as soon as she is asleep, and I don’t make a cup of tea before starting and the dishwasher remains unemptied as my bladder?

I make lists, I read in the bath, on the train, on my phone as I feed her still. I continue to send myself emails with hastily typed ideas for plot twists and scenes as they occur to me while walking along the seafront. I thank the Gods of technology for all the things that allow me to work in this way – Freedom and Scrivener and Apple and occasionally even a pen and piece of paper, or more usually the back of a receipt I should be saving for my tax return.

I walk, and I write, and I watch as the baby in front of me grows and the baby in my brain shrinks a little, and I weep for the day that she will one day turn from me and I try to remember that before long I will long for these hours of holding her close to me in the still of the night to return, and that I will have long forgotten the feeling of being constantly pulled down two opposing paths, always in more than one place, never quite able to mentally be entirely present anywhere, and I will remember only the soft fuzz of her hair rubbing against my cheek, and the pull of her fingers and the soft little sighs of her turning in her sleep.

The Lies You Told Me by Jessica Ruston is out now in paperback and as an ebook, published by Headline Books

Jessica Ruston

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